Religious Minorities and Catholic Reform in Early Modern Rome

How did religious minority groups, and individuals who did not always profess Roman Catholicism, contribute to early modern Catholic reform from within the city at its heart? Can the history of early modern Catholicism be written not only as a global religion, but also as an inter-religious enterprise – even at its core? In asking these and other questions, this workshop seeks to apply new methodologies in early modern religious history to the capital of Roman Catholicism. A vast edifice of nineteenth- and early 20th-century scholarship was built on institutional records of the Church’s many congregations. These often-prescriptive sources portrayed a monolithic, uniform, and largely successful Church and city. In response, current scholarship on early modern Catholicism emphasizes the marginal and peripheral, the domestic, and the transitory: shifting identities, fluid boundaries, reception, appropriation and adaptation. Some of the most fruitful results have examined interactions between Catholics and non-Catholics in distant missionary contexts.